In April 2020 I wrote: Longterm Warcraft III player here - fifteen years or so, take it out for spin intermittently. Got upgraded to Reforge unexpectedly from Reign of Chaos/Frozen Throne.
The minimum CPU specs seem misleading, at least to play. I’m running Reforged on an ASUS F102BA, 4GB memory, AMD A4 processor with integrated GPU (Radeon 8000 equivalent). Nothing more than 30fps, all effects on low, but campaign plays well.
The game plays fine – one you get to it. But the new introductory UI is sooo slow, as if it’s rendered in far better resource-consuming graphics than the game itself. I spend a LOT of time staring at what I suspect is a fully 3D rendered door knocker, akin to the Hearthstone wooden box. And I took a look in Task Manager (ctrl alt del while Reforged is running) – why in Warcraft III running multiple instances of the Blizzard browser as subprocesses, separate from the Blizzard app? Seems like a waste of CPU.
*** @@@@
In April 2021 I added: Well, it’s now a year later from my original report, and I’m trying out the latest Warcraft III Reforged patch on the same Asus 4GB X102BA laptop that I reported on previously.
The menu interface is still as slow as molasses. CPU is maxed out. Two instances of Warcraft III and two insrances of the Blizzard Browser are reported in Task Manager- that’s three processes (two BB and a W3) under the parent W3 process. One might wonder why, and why the old non-reforged game ran as a single process.
And I haven’t even started a game yet, because the menu system is sooo slow.
Developers need to stop tweaking game stats, and start working on why the game can’t be played on all the hardware more tgan capable of it – because the intro/menu system is so poor and resource hungry.
My computer is much better where even on modern advanced computers all the same bug. The menu is created on Lua scripts most likely they are simple awesome and horrible when only world of warcraft appeared and it was done on lua everything just became disgusting
I feal you bro. The main menu is so poorly done that I am shocked! For example i installed Dota 2 just to see how main manu performs cause its also based on Electron like in Reforge, day and night difference! Valve apparently did a good job on that… Comparing the performance of W3TFT(i still have it in my pc) and W3R on classic graphic i got a 50fps downgrade, its around 100-110 in TFT and 50-55 in Reforged. Something is suffocating game in background.
I have been working with webcode for a long time, I suspect that the same implementation was done in world of warcraft, so everything is so cottony and lagging there, but before WAR3 was created and written in C ++ until REFORGED / Electron, I suppose it could just be used as a code converter and compiler, when the main code was most likely written on web technologies, instead of Electron it is possible to compile the same C ++ some difference than it was compiled and assembled if the original code is dirty incorrectly and written on WEB. It will still be visible, poor knowledge of programming by which compiler you do not mask. This is a complete negligence and boorish attitude towards their players.
I get your point, it really does make sense and its funny when you see that something that is written in 2002 with much “older tehnology” outperforms something that is written in 2019, talking about main manu of course. Going from 3D to 2D its such a downgrade. I get a feeling that this was a one man project that was finished in 24 hours
The multiple instances of Blizzard Browser seems to be the main drawback of reforged on computers with low or mid specs.
It occupies the same memory of the game itself, just to show a couple of sliding images.
You cannot turn it off without making the game going black screen.
It seems that there are multiple instances one for each layer of the interface.
It also drains processor resources while the game is running who knows why…
On top of that, the interface itself seems to be made by a clueless web designer.
Besides that the reason of the downgrade of the game engine for the classic version is still a mystery…
(I got told I can’t include links, when I guess it meant to say my post was too long. here is the second part)
The game will run on an Atom, which is what you’d expect for something whose core engine was developed over fifteen years ago, but the intro screens graphics seem to need something much more powerful. Menus are very slow to navigate, and hard to read. Painful to change settings.
One of the main reasons for this low performance is that Blizzard dropped the support of Directx 9. Before the release of war3 reforged, it was possible to use direct3D 9 to increase your frame rate around 50-100 FPS (especially on old systems).
I have an i7-7700HQ CPU @ 2.80GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti , 16GB RAM.
DirectX9: I get over 300FPS
DirectX11: I get 180 MAX
No, even DirectX 11 would outperform OpenGL in this case. Also read a post before making a statement, its about a Code of main menu in Dota not aesthetics or something else
Lol, pressed the wrong reply button^^
Anyway I wasn’t asking about what outperforms what, I was just curious if the OpenGL option was still there…
The problem is not even the code of the main menu, but the main interface itself.
There are other posts that point out the problems related to it. Check for example what happens if you end one of the Blizzard Browsers…
…and the Dota chat of the video is still the average Dota chat anyway^^
As I said no, the performance thing was just extra, sorry if I offended your knowledge… The interface is a different story and this post is about performance. Also as a web developer I cannot agree with you, everything is a code from the moment you turn on your PC (to be more precise 1 and 0 but that is a deeper story), and “if tHatc0deis p ourlY written”(example) than you will have a hard time with it.
Electron is not the problem, maybe it uses more RAM than it should (which does free up when you start playing), but it’s still slow as crap on a machine with plenty of resources. You can make a smooth running menu with web code instead of C++ (Skype/Teams/Discord/Slack/bunch of other software) all do it. They just did it wrong.
Wait, you got me wrong, you are right about the poorly implemented code, but, beside that, even the interface design is very poorly conceived. Like the overlapping chat and the positions of the buttons. And it has nothing to do with coding. Even if you code it perfectly (which is not anyway) you will always have the chat hiding part of the rest of the interface or having to “logout” for “starting” to play. It makes no sense.
So, step 1, design it properly. Step 2, code it accordingly.
They didn’t do it for 2 years. All these 2 years, they smoked something on Sylvanas in world of warcraft. I could have suggested that it was Heroes of Storm, but even there things didn’t matter. the players shared with me a common opinion that the developer had left them a long time ago.
This thread is about the opening menu screens and their incredibly slow user interface - not framerate or opengl vs directx.
I updated Reforged on the ASUS F102BA previously described in the opening post to this thread, and spent over twenty minutes staring at the lion’s head doorknocker before I even got to a cursor and a user interface. On a 4GB machine where only the Blizzard app and Reforged were running. I could have won a two-player match in that time on the old Warcraft III.
This is not good. The game plays fine, but why would you want to wait twenty minutes to get to start it? The new user interface is completely offputting.